Why did sosreport fail to collect a /var/log/messages* file?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • After unpacking a tarball created by sosreport and checking for /var/log/messages files, the files targeted by the softlink are empty (0 size):
$ ls -gG sosreport-hostname.example.com.1638092-20160520212735/var/log/
total 176
drwxr-xr-x. 2  4096 May 19 14:56 anaconda
drwxr-x---. 2    22 May 19 14:56 audit
-rw-r--r--. 1 12632 May 19 19:26 boot.log
-rw-------. 1 33489 May 20 21:27 cron
-rw-r--r--. 1 43544 May 19 19:26 dmesg
drwx------. 2    39 May 19 16:04 httpd
lrwxrwxrwx. 1    46 May 20 21:28 messages -> ../../sos_strings/logs/var.log.messages.tailed
[...]
$ ls -gG sosreport-hostname.example.com.1638092-20160520212735/sos_strings/logs/
total 0
-rw-r--r--. 1 0 May 20 21:27 var.log.messages.tailed
              ^

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2
  • sos version 3.2-*

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